The Serpent's Tale

by Ariana Franklin

  There and then Adelia decided that whatever else happened, she herself would make for the towpath if she could—and quickly. Among this amount of disorganization, nobody would see her go and, with luck and the Lord’s good grace, she could walk to the nunnery.

  First, though, she had to find Rowley, Jacques, and Walt.

  She stood on the stairs looking for them in the confusion before her; they weren’t there, they must have been taken outside. What she did see, though, was a black shape that kept to the shadow of the walls as it made its way toward the stairs, jumping awkwardly like a frog because its feet were hobbled. The rope that had been put round its neck flapped as it came.

  Adelia drew back into the dark of the staircase, and as the creature hopped up the first rise, caught it by its arm. “No,” she said.

  The housekeeper’s hands and feet had been tied tightly enough to restrain a normal woman, but whoever had done it hadn’t reckoned with the abnormal: Dakers had hopped from wherever her guards had left her in order to try and join her mistress at the top of the tower.

  And still would if she could. As Adelia grabbed her, Dakers threw her thin body to shake her off. Unseen by anyone else, the two women struggled.

  “You’ll burn,” hissed Adelia. “For God’s sake, do you want to burn with her?”

  “Yes-s-s.”

  “I won’t let you.”

  The housekeeper was the weaker of the two. Giving up, she turned to face Adelia. She had been roughly treated; her nose was bleeding, and one of her eyes was closed and puffy. “Let me go, let me go. I’ll be with her. I got to be with her.”

  How insane. How sad. A soldier was readying the tower’s destruction; servants were oblivious to all but their own concerns. Nobody cared if the queen’s would-be assassin died in the flames, might even prefer it if she did.

  They can’t do that. She’s mad. One of the reasons Adelia loved England was that if Dakers were brought to trial for her attempt on the queen’s life, no court in the country, seeing what she was, would sentence her to death. Eleanor herself had held to it. Restrain the woman with imprisonment, yes, but the reasonable, ancient dictum of “furiosus furore solum punitur” (the madness of the insane is punishment enough) meant that anyone who’d once possessed reason but by disease, grief, or other accident had lost the use of his or her understanding must be excused the guilt of his or her crime.

  It was a ruling that agreed with everything Adelia believed in, and she wasn’t going to see it bypassed, even if Dakers herself was a willing accessory and preferred to die, burning, alongside Rosamund’s body. Life was sacred; nobody knew that better than a doctor who dealt with its absence.

  The woman was pulling away from her again. Adelia tightened her grip, feeling a physical revul-sion; she, who was never nauseated by corpses, was repelled by this living body she had to clutch so closely to her, by its thinness—it was like hugging a bundle of sticks—by its passion for death.

  “Don’t you want to avenge her?” She said it because it was all she could think of to keep the woman still, but, after a minute, a measure of sanity came into the eyes glaring into hers.

  The mouth stopped hissing. “Who did it?”

  “I don’t know yet. I’ll tell you this much, it wasn’t the queen.”

  Another hiss. Dakers didn’t believe her. “She paid so’s it could be done.”

  “No.” Adelia added, “It wasn’t Bertha, either.”

  “I know that.” Contemptuously.

  There was a sudden, curious intimacy. Adelia felt herself sucked into whatever understanding the woman possessed, saw her own worth as an ally calculated, dismissed—and then retrieved. She was, after all, the only ally.

  “I find things out. It’s what I do,” Adelia said, slackening her grip a little. Suppressing distaste, she added, “Come along with me and we’ll find things out together.”

  Once more she was weighed, found wanting, weighed again, and adjudged as possibly useful.

  Dakers nodded.

  Adelia fumbled in her pocket for her knife and cut the rope round the housekeeper’s ankles and took the noose from round the neck over her head. She paused, unsure whether to free her hands as well. “You promise?”

  The only good eye squinted at her. “You’ll find out?”

  “I’ll try. It’s why the Bishop of Saint Albans brought me here.” Not very reassuring, she thought, considering that the Bishop of Saint Albans was leaving the place as a prisoner and Armageddon was about to break out.

  Dakers held out her skinny wrists.

  Schwyz had left the guardroom in order to gain control of the situation in the bailey outside. Some of the servants had gone with him; the few that remained were still gathering their goods and didn’t notice the two women sidling out.

  There was equal confusion in the bailey. Adelia covered Dakers’s head with the hood of her cloak and then put up her own so that they would be just two more anonymous figures in the scurry.

  A rising wind added to the noise as it whirled little showers of snowflakes that were slow to melt. Moonlight came and went like a guttering candle.

  Disregarded, still clutching Dakers, Adelia moved through the chaos with Ward at her heels, looking for Rowley. She glimpsed him on the far side of the bailey, and it was a relief to see that Jacques and Walt were with him, all three roped together. Nearby, the Abbot of Eynsham was arguing over them with Schwyz, his voice dominating the noise made by the wind and bustle.

  “... I don’t care, you tyrant, I need to know what they know. They come with us.” Schwyz’s retort was whirled away, but Eynsham had won. The three prisoners were prodded toward the crowd at the gateway, where Eleanor was getting up on a horse.

  Damn, damn it. She must talk to Rowley before they were separated. Whether she could do it unnoticed ... and with a failed assassin in tow ... yet she dared not let go of Dakers’s hand.

  And Dakers was laughing, or, at least, a low cackle was emerging from the hood round her face. “What is it?” Adelia asked, and found that in taking her eyes off Rowley and the others she had lost sight of them. “Oh, be quiet.”

  Agonized with indecision, she towed the woman toward the archway that led to the outer bailey and the entrance to the maze. The wind blew the servants’ cloaks open and closed as they milled about so that the golden lion of Aquitaine on their tabards flickered in the light of the torches. Soldiers, tidy in their padded jackets, tried to impose order, snatching unnecessary and weighty items away from clutching arms and restraining their owners from snatching them back. Only Eleanor was calm, controlling her horse with one hand and shielding her eyes with the other in order to watch what was being done, looking for something.

  She saw Ward, like a small, black sheep against the snow, and pointed the animal out to Schwyz with a gloved finger as she gave an order. Schwyz looked round and pointed in his turn. “That one, Cross,” he shouted at one of his men. “Bring her. That one with the dog.”

  Adelia found herself seized and hoisted onto a mule. She struggled, refusing to let go of Dakers’s hand.

  The man called Cross took the line of least resis-tance; he lifted Dakers as well so that she clung on to Adelia’s back. “And bloody stay there,” he yelled at them. With one hand on the mule’s bridle and his body pinning Adelia’s leg, he took his charges through the archway and into the outer bailey, holding back until the rest of the cavalcade joined them.

  Eleanor rode to the front, Eynsham just behind her. The open gates of the maze yawned like a black hole before them.

  “Go straight through, Queen of my heart,” the abbot called to her joyfully. “Straight as my old daddy’s plow.”

  “Straight?” the queen shouted back.

  He spread his arms. “Didn’t you order I to learn the whore’s mysteries? Diddun I do it for ee?”

  “There’s a direct way through?” Eleanor was laughing. “Abbot, my abbot. ‘And the crooked shall be made straight ...’”

  “‘... and the rough pla
ces plain,’” he finished for her. “That old Isaiah, he knew a thing or two. I am but his servant, and yours. Go, my queen, and the Lord’s path shall lead you through the whore’s thicket.”

  Preceded by some of her men, one holding a lantern, Eleanor entered the maze, still laughing. The cavalcade followed her.

  Behind them, Schwyz gave another order and a lit torch arched through the air onto the piled tinder in the guardroom ...

  The abbot was right; the way through the maze had been made straight. Alleys were direct passageways into the next. Blocking hedges revealed themselves as disguised, now open, doors.

  Mystery had gone. The wind took away the maze’s silence; the hedges around them bent and shivered like ordinary storm-tossed avenues. Some insidious essence had been withdrawn; Adelia couldn’t be sorry. What she found extraordinary was that if the strange abbot who declared himself a devotee of the queen could be believed, Rosamund herself had shown him the secret of the way through.

  “You know that man?” she asked over her shoulder. Flinching, she felt Dakers’s thin chest heave up and down against her back as the housekeeper began cackling again.

  “Ain’t he the clever one.” It wasn’t so much a reply as Dakers’s commentary to herself. “Thinks he’s bested our wyrm, so he do, but that’s still got its fangs.” Perhaps it was part of her madness, Adelia thought, that there was no animosity in her voice toward a man who, self-confessed, had visited Rosamund in her tower in order to betray her to the queen.

  They were through the maze within minutes. Swearing horribly at the mule, Cross urged it into a trot so that Adelia and Dakers were cruelly bumped up and down on its saddleless spine as it charged the hill.

  The wind strengthened and drove snow before it in sporadic horizontal bursts that shut out the moon before letting it ride the sky again. As they crested the hill it slammed, shrieking, into their faces.

  Adelia looked back and saw Rowley, Jacques, and Walt being prodded out of the maze by the spears of the men behind them.

  There was a howl of triumph from Dakers; her head was turned to the tower—a black, erect, and unperturbed outline against the moon.

  “That’s right, that’s right,” Dakers screamed, “our lord Satan did hear me, my darling. I’ll be back for ee, my dear. Wait for me.”

  The tower wasn’t burning. It should have been a furnace by now, but despite broken furniture, oil, a draft, and a torch, the bonfire hadn’t caught. Something, some thing, had put out the fire.

  Its door faced the wind, Adelia told herself. The wind carried snow and extinguished the flames.

  But what couldn’t be extinguished was the image of Rosamund, diabolically preserved, waiting in that cold upper chamber for her servant to return to her ...

  It was a sad little flotilla at the river: rowing boats, punts, an old wherry, all found moored along the banks and commandeered by Schwyz’s soldiers. The only vessel of any substance was the barge that Mansur and Oswald and the Godstow men had brought upriver to collect Rosamund’s body. Adelia looked for Mansur and, when she didn’t see him, became frightened that the soldiers had killed him. These were crude men; they reminded her of the followers of Crusade armies passing through Salerno who’d been prepared to slaughter anybody with an appearance different from their own. There was a tall figure standing in the barge’s prow, but the man was cloaked and hooded like everybody else and the snow hindered identification. It could be Mansur, it could be a soldier.

  She tried reassuring herself with the fact that Schwyz and his men were mercenaries and more interested in utility than the slaughter of Saracens; they would surely see the need to keep alive every skilled boatman they had to take them to Oxford.

  The chaos that had reigned in Wormhold’s bailey was now redoubled as Eleanor’s people fought to accompany their queen on the Godstow barge—the only one with a cabin. If there was someone managing the embarkation, he was overwhelmed.

  The mercenary Cross, in charge of Adelia and Dakers, waited too long for orders; by the time he realized there weren’t going to be any, the barge was dangerously overladen with the queen’s servants and baggage. He and the two women were waved away from it.

  Cursing, he hauled them both along to the next vessel in line and almost threw them into its stern. Ward made a leap and joined them.

  It was a rowing boat. An open rowing boat tied by a hawser onto the stern of the Godstow barge. Adelia shrieked at the soldier, “You can’t put us here. We’ll freeze.” Exposed to the lacerating wind in this thing, they’d be dead long before they reached Oxford, two corpses as rigid as Rosamund’s.

  The boat shuddered as three more people were forced into it by another guard, who clambered in after them. A voice deeper than Adelia’s and more used to carrying overrode the wind: “In the name of God, man, do you want to kill us? Get us under cover. Ask the queen, that lady there saved her life.” The Bishop of Saint Albans had joined her, and her protest. Still roped to Jacques and Walt and at a spear’s end, he nevertheless carried authority.

  “I’m getting it, aren’t I?” Cross shouted back. “Shut your squalling. Sit there. In front of the women.”

  Once everybody was settled to his satisfaction, he produced a large bundle that turned out to be an old sail and called to his companion, addressing him as Giorgio, to help him spread it.

  Whatever their manners, he and his companion were efficient. The wind tried to whip the canvas away from them, but Dakers and Adelia were made to sit on one end of it before it was looped back and up, bringing it forward so that it covered them as well as the three prisoners and, finally, the two soldiers themselves, who took their seat in the prow. Their efforts had been self-preservation; they were coming, too. With deliberate significance, Giorgio placed a stabbing sword across his knees.

  The sail was dirty and smelly, and rested heavily on the top of everybody’s head, not quite wide enough for its purpose, so that covering themselves fully against the slanting wind on one side left a gap on the other. Ice formed over it immediately, rendering it stiff but also making a protective layer. It was shelter of a sort.

  The river was being whipped into a fury that slopped wavelets of icy water over the gunwales. Adelia heaved Ward onto her lap, covered him with her cloak, and put her feet up against Rowley’s back to keep them out of the wet—he was on the thwart immediately in front of her on the starboard side where the gap was. Jacques sat between him and Walt.

  “Are you all right?” She had to shout against the shriek of the wind.

  “Are you?” he asked.

  “Splendid.”

  The messenger was also trying to be brave.

  Adelia heard him say, “Boat trip—makes a nice change.”

  “It’ll come out of your wages,” the bishop told him. Walt grunted.

  There was no time for more. The two soldiers were yelling at them to bail “before this bloody scow goes under,” and were handing out receptacles with which to do it. The three prisoners were given proper bailers while two jugs were passed to the women. “And put your bloody backs to it.”

  Adelia began bailing—if the boat sank beneath them, they’d be dead before they could scramble to the bank. As fast as she could, she chucked icy water out into the river. The river chucked it back.

  Seen through the gap in the sail, the scudding snow was vaguely illuminated by the lamp on the stern of the barge ahead and the prow of whatever vessel was behind them, providing just enough light for Adelia to recognize the pitifully inadequate jug with which she was bailing. It was of silver and had lately stood on the tray on which a servant had brought food and drink to Eleanor in Rosamund’s chamber. The Aquitanians had been right; the mercenaries—the two in this boat, at any rate— were thieves.

  Adelia experienced a sudden fury that centered on the stolen jug but had more to do with being cold, tired, wet, in extreme discomfort, and frightened for her life. She turned on Dakers, who was doing nothing. “Bail, blast you.”

  The woman remaine
d motionless, her head lolling. Probably dead, Adelia thought.

  Anger had afflicted Rowley as well. He was shouting at his captor to free their hands so he and Jacques and Walt could bail faster—they were being slowed by having to scoop the water up and out in awkward unison.

  He was again told to shut his squalling, but after a minute Adelia felt the boat rock even more heavily and then heard the three men in front of her swearing. She gathered from their abuse that they’d been cut free of one another but the separate pieces of rope that bound each pair of wrists were still in place.

  Still, the three could now bail quicker—and did. Adelia transferred her fury to Dakers for dying after all she, Adelia Aguilar, had done for her. “Sheer ingratitude,” she snapped, and grabbed the woman’s wrist. For the second time that night, she felt a weak pulse.

  Leaning forward so that she nearly squashed the dog on her lap, she jerked Dakers’s feet out of the bilge and, to warm them, pushed one between the bodies of Rowley and Jacques and the other between Jacques and Walt.

  “How long are we going to sit here?” she screamed over their heads at the soldiers. “God’s rib, when are we going to move?”

  But the wind screamed louder than she could; the men didn’t hear her. Rowley, though, nodded his head in the direction of the gap.

  She peered out at the whirling curtain of snow. They were moving, had been moving for some time, and had reached a bend in the river where a high bank of trees must have been sheltering them a little.

  Whether the barge in front, to which they were attached, was being poled by men or pulled by a horse, she didn’t know—a dreadful task for either. It was probably being poled; they seemed to be going faster than walking pace. The wind at their backs and the flow of the river was helping them along, sometimes too much—the prow of their boat bumped into the stern of the barge, and the soldiers were having to take turns to struggle out from under the sail cover to fend off with an oar.